


Adopted

by jsymo



Series: Breifs [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Cute Kids, Dean and Kids, Fluff, M/M, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-29
Updated: 2014-09-29
Packaged: 2018-02-19 07:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2379899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jsymo/pseuds/jsymo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean have adopted two kids. And their daughter is experiencing a few problems that they have to come up with creative solutions to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adopted

Adopted children often have different quirks than children who live with their biological parents. For starters, children who are adopted typically ask the question of “where are my real parents?” which fortunately for Sam and Dean their kids weren’t old enough to recognize that they were adopted yet so answering that question hadn’t become a problem.

The main difference between an adopted child and one who wasn’t is the developmental curve. 

Something about living in an orphanage or foster home for the first year or so does something to the kid that keeps them from developing as quickly as they would have if those vital months of infancy had been spent in stable, enriching environments. 

This is exactly why Matthew hadn’t taken an interest in potty training until shortly after his third birthday, and why at two and a half Maggie would out stubborn Dean every time he put the girl on her “ _pretty, big girl potty_ ”.

So it surprised neither brother that their daughter went through a six month, seemingly endless, period of separation anxiety every time that Sam left the house. She would pout, scream, cry, hit and throw things until she either tired herself out or until Sam came back home, and then Maggie would wrap around her younger father like a second skin, eyes red, one hand clutched to his shirt, the other tangled in his hair. 

It got to the point about two months in, when Dean had placed Maggie in her play pen after he had dropped Matthew off at preschool and he noticed that her distressed cries had turned into ones of pain. 

It turns out that if you aggravate your tonsils enough, like crying constantly for months, you can cause them to become inflamed or to start bleeding.

Maggie had gotten her tonsils removed as a result, and fortunately Sam was able to get off of work while the little girl was in the hospital to keep her from crying out while healing.

He wasn’t able to stay home forever, and when he finally went back to work the crying came back with a vengeance. 

It got to the point that she started sleeping with Sam and Dean at night because it didn’t help the situation out if Maggie’s crying kept all four members of the household awake night after night. 

Dean was completely out of his mind trying to come up with solutions to Maggie’s crying. He had tried distracting her by taking the little girl out to the park to swing and play on the slides at a playground, but all he got was a shrieking toddler who squirmed so much that he had trouble putting her into the seat of the swing set and a couple of stay at home moms who watched on and whispered things to one another behind their hands. 

When public outings weren’t helping out the distressed girl – and made Dean feel like people were looking upon him as the worst father alive – he moved on to trying to play with Maggie so much that she was too tired to cry. 

He had sat down in the living room with her with all of her favorite toys around her and he had tried to hold a tea party, he even made a handful of small cookies and cut up some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to make it more special. 

Maggie’s attention was off of Sam for all of two minutes before she lashed out at her older father. Dean had attempted to pour some ‘tea’ into Maggie’s tea cup, and with a stunningly quick reflex the two year old had grabbed the pink plastic tea kettle and hurled it at her father’s head. 

Dean was sitting in the emergency room with a dish towel pressed to his bleeding eyebrow and a two year old attached to his leg crying out for her dad when he decided enough was enough. 

Sam came home from work to find Maggie in her playpen like always, and her crying cut out when she finally got her eyes on her younger father. 

He quickly dropped his bag and grabbed her under her arms to haul her into a hug like he did every night when he finally came home.

She broke out into coughs right away as her abused throat muscles tickled with inflammation and Sam walked into the kitchen to get her a juice box to find Dean listening to an IPod of all things, and Matthew was sitting at the kitchen table watching a kid’s movie on the home laptop, also wearing headphones. 

Sam frowned as he pulled an apple juice out of the fridge and inserted the straw before holding it in front of his daughter’s mouth. She sucked on the straw and looked about the kitchen as if she didn’t have time to notice her surroundings until her younger father was finally home.

Sam reached out and tapped Dean’s shoulder, who hadn’t noticed Sam had arrived home since his back was toward him as he made stir fry at the stove. 

Dean turned around – removing his ear buds as he did so – and Sam gasped at the gauze pad taped to Dean’s eyebrow. 

“Dean what happened,” Sam reached out to remove part of the gauze to look at the damage, “did you get stitches?”

“Yeah,” Dean admitted.

“What happened?”

Dean smiled, but the amusement got nowhere near his eyes, “your daughter.”

“What?”

“Yep.”

“What did she do?” Sam asked looking at the innocent curly haired two year-old on his hip drinking from her juice box.

“She threw her tea kettle at me.”

“The plastic one?”

“Yeah. Whipped it at my head so hard it split my eyebrow open and it required three stitches,” Dean replied turning around to take the stir fry off of the stove. 

“I don’t like this Dean,” Sam said as he patted Maggie’s back as she started coughing. 

“Yeah? Well how do you think I felt sitting in the ER because my two year old decided to crack my head open?”

“You went to the hospital?” Sam looked at Dean with disbelief.

“Yeah,” Dean eyed Sam like he was a moron.

“Why didn’t you do it yourself? You’ve stitched up worse.”

Dean shrugged as he laid some plates on the table. “We have health insurance now?” Dean said it like a question, “I dunno, normal people get a split in their head, they head to the hospital. Figured I would too.”

Sam’s lips pulled down into his patented look that said _”Fair enough”_ , and went to deposit Maggie into her high chair. 

“So what are we going to do?”

“About Maggie?”

“Yeah,” Sam turned around but kept a hand on his daughters head, ruffling his fingers through her curly brown hair. “This has already required medical assistance for two members of our household Dean. I really want to know why she has developed such an attachment to me.”

“Well,” Dean turned around, leaning against the counter and scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’m not so sure that it’s just an attachment to you.”

“Well, no offense Dean, but she doesn’t get that way when you leave the room.”

“That’s because I always come right back, I mean remember when Maggie would cry every night until we let Mattie stay in her room until she fell asleep?”

“Yeah.”

“Well I think she’s attached to all of us, and we just need to convince her that no matter where any of us go she knows that we’re going to come back for her,” Dean shrugged. 

“Dean, I come back every night, and I spend all of my free time with her, we even let her stay in bed with us, I’m not sure what else I can do to prove to a two year old that I’m not leaving her.”

“Don’t worry Sam,” Dean spoke as he reached forward and kissed his little brother, “we’ll figure something out.”

Sam rubbed at his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose when he felt a tug on the hand that was on his daughter’s head. 

He looked down to see her holding firmly onto his thumb, tugging at it while looking up into his face with tears at-the-ready in her eyes. 

“You want up baby girl?” he asked already knowing the answer to her question.

All he got was a fat lip pout before he was sighing and picking Maggie up yet again. 

Sam now understood why women had wider hips than men, having slim hips _sucked_ when you were a father, Sam was constantly leaning to the side and adjusting things whenever he held his kids that way, and if he held them for too long his back was in knots. But Maggie didn’t care at all about that, and Sam didn’t really either. All he knew was that the corners of her brown doe eyes would fill up with tears and he would do anything possible to make them go away.

He sat down at his place and sighed before tugging over Maggie’s much smaller plate and utensils so that she could each from her perch on Sam’s lap.

Dean placed the hot pan with the chicken and rice stir fry on a hot pad at the center of the kitchen table and Sam immediately reached out and began spooning a small portion onto Maggie’s and his plate.

“Matthew!” Sam called out to his son who was still contentedly listening to and watching his movie. 

Blue eyes looked calmly back at him over the top of the laptop screen.

“Shut ‘er down buddy,” Sam motioned with his hands and his usually patient four year-old sighed in annoyance at him. Sam raised an eye to that and looked back at his son.

“Is GiGi done cryin’ yet Dad?” Matthew asked once he had slipped his headphones off.

“Yeah, Dad’s home and GiGi isn’t so sad anymore,” Dean replied for Sam as he walked by, placing a kiss on Maggie’s head while scooping up the laptop from in front of Mattie.

“She cries a lot when i’s just Daddy and me,” Mattie said simply.

Sam frowned as he cut up a small piece of chicken for his daughter.

“Is she ever gonna stop?” Mattie asked while watching Dean cut up his food for him.

“She’s just sad whenever Dad leaves for work buddy, she misses him a lot and just needs to be reminded of how much he loves her,” Dean placed Matthew’s plate in front of him, “blow on that, the chicken is a little hot.”

Matthew scooted forward in his chair and stabbed a piece of chicken, blowing wet cheek-fulls of air at the food to cool it.

Sam pulled Maggie’s plate further within reach and the little girl attacked her chicken too. Maggie was being encouraged to start using utensils on her own, and she compromised with her fathers by picking up her food and placing it on her spoon before moving it to her mouth.

It wasn’t quite what Sam was going for, but Maggie always felt so accomplished with herself during this small task, so he couldn’t find the heart to correct her. 

The meal progressed in its usual way, Maggie did her best to get food everywhere but in her mouth between coughing fits, Matthew told his fathers the exciting things that he did at daycare, and Sam answered Dean’s mandatory “how was work?” inquiry.

Though it made Sam upset Maggie kept him from helping Dean clean up, because the minute he stood up from the table to do something other than pay every ounce of his attention toward the little girl she would start screaming for her younger father. 

Sam spent the remainder of his night as he had for the last few months, snuggling with Maggie on the couch while watching TV with Dean and talking to Matthew about whatever topics the four year old could conjure up.

*****

Sam was exhausted, and he still had three lectures to go in the day before he could take off early and skip his office hours. He was currently in his advanced topics class talking to his students about the use of Freud’s theories when reading Shakespeare when his laptop started blipping where it was on his desk.

He leaned back from where he had perched himself on the table at the front of the room and saw that Dean was calling him on Skype. There was only ten minutes left in the lecture and he only had eight students in that particular class so he figured that he could risk taking Dean’s call.

“Uhm, hold on just a second guys, I’m getting a call from my partner,” Sam turned the laptop towards himself and accepted Dean’s call. 

Immediately the first thing that came across the speakers was the sound of Maggie crying in the background and Sam frowned in apology to his students. 

A moment later Dean’s face popped up on the screen and Sam could see that Dean was sitting in the kitchen.

“Dean is everything all right?” he flicked a glance at his students to indicate that this might not be the best time. 

“Yeah, just hold on a sec,” Dean vacated the chair and the sound of Maggie crying got louder.

Sam’s adams apple bobbed in his embarrassment at the situation but his facial features softened when he spied his two year old on the screen, “Hey princess,” he greeted his daughter who stopped crying right away.

Dean was smiling behind Maggie who was bouncing on Dean’s lap, “alright college boy?”

Sam nodded, picking up his laptop and displaying the screen to his class. “Guys, this is my partner Dean, and our daughter Magdelena.”

His students all waved and greeted Dean and Maggie and Sam placed his laptop back on the desk not sure what Dean had called for.

“Go ahead and get back to your lecture, we’ll talk when you’re done.”

Sam licked his lips and nodded, trying to ignore his new audience, but unable to not notice how Maggie remained calm and quiet while watching Sam through the screen.

The final ten minutes of Sam’s lecture passed and he let his students leave. When all of the doors were shut and Sam was finally alone he addressed the screen of his laptop.

“Not that I don’t mind the call,” Sam started while sitting down, “but why did you call during my lecture?”

Dean shrugged and lifted Maggie while holding onto her sides; she kicked her feet out to ‘jump’ on her father’s thighs.

“I was getting ready to spend another evening listened to that damn IPod of yours and I remembered that the laptop had a webcam on it. Figured if Maggie got to watch you at work she’d stop crying.”

Sam smiled at Maggie who sat down and took an interest in pulling on the strings of Dean’s hoodie, no longer paying her younger father any attention.

“Well, it certainly seems to be working.”

“So you wanna give this a try?” Dean asked around Maggie’s sticky fingers which she had started sticking in his mouth.

Sam watched Maggie, climbing all over Dean like he was a jungle gym, blowing spit slippery lips against his neck and making him smile. Poking her fingers into his mouth and wrapping her free hand in the material of his collar. 

Could he handle glancing at his desk during lectures to watch his daughter grow up and play and see Dean’s smiling face on days when his students were giving him a particularly hard time?

“Yeah, I think that could work,” Sam said as he started putting his things away in his bag, “but I swear to God, the first time you say something inappropriate --.”

“Hey, hey,” Dean held up a hand in his defense, “I’ll be an A student, promise.”

Sam paused in his ministrations to shoot a glare at the screen and just barely made out Dean’s suggestive smirk before he hid it with an innocent smile. 

This Skype thing was going to be a great thing if it kept Maggie complacent during the day until she out-grew this current phase, but might not be so great for Sam’s reputation on campus if word got around that he was in a relationship with someone like Dean. Rough, outspoken, a little inappropriate at times, ridiculously hot…

Sam was about to say his goodbye to Dean and shut the computer screen when he thought better of it and decided to talk into his computer on his way to his office. 

_What the hell_ , he thought, _let ‘em know that I have a trophy husband._


End file.
